Better Scientific Presentations

Here is a way to deal with images that come in different sizes and/or orientations: mask them with circles.  Here is what I mean You have probably already seen this with Google and Apple productions. Circles are fun, dynamic, harmonious, and they are also points. Now, there is a whole visual grammar behind points, but that's not the topic of this post. Let's do the before-after thing. Consider this fake slide By the way, also Featured pictures from Wiki Commons. The images are very good, but we can take them to the next level.  Their sizes are around 700px, so I'll mask them with circles with a diameter of 300px. This is the result Certainly better, but how did I do it? Most Slideware packages allow you to crop an image with a shape .  Google it and you'll get the technical know-how. I'll demo with Keynote 6.   Select a Circle: Insert > Shape > Cicle. Make it the size that you want.  We'll rescale all images at the end, so don...

Back in January I promised I would do a tutorial on how to turn a portrait image into a full side slide. Well I can't start a series on tables without first doing that tutorial. Let's get started. The "problem" is simple, you have an image with the right height of a slide, the the width is not enough. In the case of a 1024 × 768 slide, some images come in the 512 × 768 size, so what to do with the other half? Case in point, Figure 1: Original portrait image. I would like to use this image taken from Wikimedia commons, but what to do with the other half? The result that I what to go is this Figure 2: turning Figure 1 into a full side slide With would give me white space and a sense of continuity that I really like. SO that's what we are going to do,  makeover Figure 1 into Figure 2.  The trick is simple, (1) we crop some pixels from Figure's 1 right border,  (2) stretch it to cover the rest of slide, and (3) blur it.  There is pre-processing and s...

After yesterday's post, this morning I played with the red wolf's image a little bit more. For some time I found it challenging to use an image that fills the height but not the width of the screen I call this a portrait photo. But recently, going through Before & After Magazine's Master Collection,  I found a trick to leverage a slide that contains this portrait mode images. So this morning I applied the trick to the wolf's image, and I was so impressed by the result, that I decided to share it. I'll be doing a full tutorial on this in the coming weeks. The trick is to copy a 20 pixel wide stripe from top to bottom of the image's left, right side (or both) border, stretch the strip or strips to fill the space, and then strongly blur it. With this trick, you can create a nice looking title slide. As I said, I was pretty satisfy with mine.

You might be willing to include images in your next presentation, but might be confused to know where to start. In this post I give a provide resources on where to get free images, how to choose good images and how to process them to fit your needs. Sadly, I forgot to take my camera to Paris. You got to love Wikipedia! I'm back from a (long) summer holiday in partly Paris. I was really  impressed by the quality of their advertisements. I was in fact so impressed that I'm  again immersed in graphic design and photography. So I thought I would write about photography resources: where to get free photos, what makes a image good for a presentation, and some tips on how to improve those free photos to get them to work. Where to get free but good images? I have mentioned this place already, but it so good I'll mention it again. Compfight is a Flickr search engine that filter images according to their license, either commercial or creative commons. So people already...

In this post I give an example of how photos can be used in a presentation's visuals. I show one more example of image manipulation and how to use the power of analogy to produce beautiful visuals.  I'm helping a friend creating a presentation stack for a talk about an exchange program between a university here in Germany and the Universidade de Sao Paulo in Brazil. Strictly speaking this is not a scientific presentation, but it will take place in a university context. The audience is made of potential students that would take part on the program exchange. After gathering the important facts, I went to Wikipedia and Fickr to pull some images. All the images have a creative commons license.  Here are some examples: To start, Sao Paulo. I pulled this panorama of old downtown Sao Paulo from Wikipedia. The original is larger than the size of canvas. Instead of trying to scale it or crop it to make it fill in one slide, I animated it in Keynote by moving from right to left. ...